Lester: November 11 2018, 01:50 UTC – Kamchatka

Hi Chris… and welcome to our seismic group.

The truth of it is, not all Quake Watch participants use the tools and models provided here. Some like myself have joined this site, and brought along our own methods,theory’s and ideas, which we test in the public arena or share with others like yourself. The resources provided here are very effective at finding potentially significant pre-seismic regions, you just have to give yourself time to find the right rhythm with them… Ben’s own record is testament to that.

There are many different elemental categories used to try and find the next potential big one. Examples include tidal forces, hurricane or tropical storm influences, planetary alignments, solar weather and gravitational forces from the sun and moon etc. My particular method relates in part to the latter, but I am not a member of the gravity crowd. Instead, I use sunlight and moonlight to try and determine the location of potential seismic anomalies i.e. I use the solar / lunar terminators like a radar scanning the surface of the Earth… it takes a lot of practice to be able to sound this delusional 🙂 . Simply put, I watch for data spikes or aspect changes in online space data. Then relate these times of occurrence to a real-time solar / lunar terminator map, and note the positions of the terminators at said times. After several days of cross-referencing data spikes with the terminator thresholds, you end up with the terminators being located in the same place on several occasions… they kind of zero in on a potential target.

This being said, and in answer to your original question. I noted two moderate aspect changes in the ACE satellite solar-wind data… these coincided with the dawn / sunrise times in the Kamchatka region. Later in the day, a significant aspect change occurred which coincided with the sun being located on longitude 156’30’E. To start with, there are only two “regular” seismic locations on this longitude… Kamchatka and Bougainville P.N.G.. The former data concluded Kamchatka was the favoured choice, however, recent activity in this region made it probable that the ACE data could be conceived as residual energy… if you heat up a rock, it does take some time to cool down !. My final decision was based on the fact that two major events had occurred here recently, so the potential could be there for a third event greater than 6+. Unfortunately, the end result was only an M 4.6… so I’m afraid I would be a poor roll model if you decided to go down this route 🙂 . My method does get some results, but because of the complexities involved, it is sometimes like trying to play tic-tac-toe with sixty squares… hope that makes sense.

Give the resources provided here a fair chance, if you find that you wish to try something different in the future… I would be happy to help.

Hey Chris… I didn’t have a lot of free time yesterday, so I could only manage the short version 🙂

Actually, it is a failing of mine that I sometimes go a little overboard, so I sincerely thank you for your polite response. If it helped you to gain a little insight and answer your question, it was then worth the effort.

I wish you luck with your future attempts, and look forward to seeing you on the quake board.

Lester